I know these types of mods are all over the place, but I just thought this was way cool.

An individual calling himself “Lilmuckers” has posted the process he went through to build a mac-mini into the wall of his kitchen. “It is hidden and everything works perfectly.” he says.

The Mac mini is pretty small as it is, but I’m all for aesthetics. The less visible and obvious it is, the better.

via MacMerc

Cosmetics aside, this is actually a pretty inventive casemod to add two more hard drives to a G5. I’m guessing there would be heat issues and you’d need a controller card, but if you need more space than the two internal slots offer (I have both of mine filled) and don’t want a stack of external cases on your desk, this is certainly a viable option.

Great. Now another clone of another iPod, simply named the “IPOD Mini”. While there are slight differences and it has an FM tuner and voice-recorder, it’s again, near identical in form factor and overall design to the iPod mini.

The term “supershuffle” was at least some attempt to diverge from the name. But, capital letters?

I don’t know French, but according to the Babel Fish translation, at IDF 2005, Intel announced a mini PC, strikingly similar to the Mac mini, in size and design. It has a CD/DVD drive, runs Windows XP MCE and uses the Napa platform, the next Centrino.

Check out the site for some snapshots.

In case you were waiting for this, it’s now available for purchase. Oh yeah, and it’s 10% off the $1199 price, so you can get it for just under $1080. Did you hear that? 24 inches of LCD goodness for $1080. The cheapest 23″ or 24″ mammoth I’ve seen exceeds $1600.

Let the frenzy begin.

I’ve got a bit of a dilemma that I’m hoping the ForeverGeek staff and readers can assist me with.

For the past 8 years or so, I’ve been running a 21″ CRT as my primary display. I’ve loved it from the day I brought it home and it’s served me well. Acquiring it was a milestone for me, almost on par with getting my dual G5 this time last year.

Now it’s time to retire the beast and move to LCD. I’ve considered getting a 20″ or 21″ display, as I like the resolution these sizes offer, but cost aside, I wouldn’t gain any more screen acreage than what I have now and that just doesn’t feel worth the $1K or so. Dell is set to release a 24″ LCD in just a few days, but even at 1920×1200, I’m not sure I want to pony up the $1199 (or whatever it comes to be with their awesome coupon deals) when I can get two 17″ or 19″ displays for half that and HAVE TWO DISPLAYS and 2560×1028 resolution!

Thus, my dilemma. Both 17″ and 19″ offer the same native resolution. Response time is important to me, so I don’t want anything more than 16ms. It must also support DVI and analog connections. Fortunately, this limits my choices in both sizes. The Samsung 172x is a great display, super fast, but lacks swivel and I don’t like the VESA mounting and lack of height adjustment. The Viewsonic VP171b is my favorite: faster yet, thin bezel and black. Dell has great deals almost daily on their line of flat-panels and if the timing is right, I can get the 1905FP for just a few bucks more than the Viewsonic. It’s significantly slower (violating my 16ms requirement), but does offer USB 2.0 ports.

Are those 2 extra inches really worth it? Two 17’s would fit much nicer on my desk and probably suit me just fine, but part of me, whether it’s ego or just that I’m used to 21″, wants two 19’s. Both monitors get great reviews, so I’m torn.

Two 17″ Viewsonics or two 19″ Dells?

If you are one of the perhaps many concerned mini owners, who worry that using a putty knife to open your mini will damage it’s precious aluminum skin, worry no more.

This Chinese site has an excellent photo tutorial on how to open your mini, using modified bamboo chopsticks. The softness and tensile strength of the bamboo apparently make the food utensils a great tool for this and from what I can tell from the pictures, there is absolutely no damage to the mini whatsoever.

Read the full tutorial if you can (I suppose you could just jump right to the end). There’s a neat mod to the mini at the end, in the form of a cork covering that looks very professional. Not sure if we can get cork adhesive tape here in the U.S., at least that thin, but I might investigate the next time I’m at the craft store.

No, not by us. X86-Secret, a French hardware site, has reviewed a chip that appears to be the yet unreleased Pentium 630, the successor to the 530. Not much of a speed improvement, but it does have double the cache and 64-bit extensions.

If you know French, you can check out the original site, otherwise, head on over to Ars Technica and check out their translation.

Yes, it’s been done.

This guy took his 1.25GHz mini and overclocked it to 1.42GHz. Via four jumpers, the G4’s speed can be selected between four settings: 1.25, 1.42, 1.50 and 1.58GHz. He tried 1.5GHz, but had stability issues.

I probably won’t be this bold, as the jumpers are really, really tiny and I wonder if I could even get 1.58GHz out of my faster G4 (it wouldn’t be worth it for just 1.5GHz). Maybe when the warranty runs out and I dramatically improve my SMT soldering skills…

Smaller than the Virginia Tech and the massive US Army clusters, this is still an impressive implementation. While it doesn’t appear that they are aiming to compete in the super-computer realm, they have put together a powerful system. These are dual 2GHz G5s, so that’s 1280 processors and each Xserve has 4GB of RAM.

There is one thing that this cluster has that I believe wasn’t available in the VT cluster:

The Turing Cluster is available to students and faculty for school-related projects. The school’s Usage Policies specify that “the cluster is to be used for scientific and engineering computational jobs only; no other work is allowed.” In addition, sponsors of the program, all different departments in schools in the University of Illinois, can utilize the system for their own projects.

Too cool. Check out their site for pictures and a live webcam.

Via TMO.

I can just see it now:

Mechanic: “What seems to be the problem?”

Customer: “I’m not sure. My car just freaked out yesterday. The windshield wipers started wiping, the lights were flashing on and off, and when I turned on the radio, I got a BSOD.”

Mechanic: “Hmm, sounds like you caught a virus.”

Customer: “Again? Geez, that’s the third time this month. I just installed Norton Mobile Anti-Virus® last night!”

Mechanic: “Well, we’ll have to reformat your car and reinstall Windows XP Automotive®. You can pick your it up in about 39 minutes…”

Back in the late 80s, when I was in college, I owned an Amiga 500. The OS booted off of a floppy, but it had loads of memory (relative to all my dormmates PCs), had awesome sound and graphics, and it was all native. Even that was an upgrade from a Commodore 64, so I had yet to even really see a “PC compatible”. With what I could do on the Amiga, I found it difficult to comprehend why anyone would mess around with a PC.

Sometime later I gave some guy on the internet the 500 and some cash and got myself a 2000 with dual floppies and a 40MB HDD. Now I was in the big leagues, with a Motorola 68030 25MHz processor–a real screamer. No, seriously. It was 1990 and that was some serious speed then. That machine was my baby for some time until I eventually got out in the real world and finally got bit by the PC bug. I’ve missed it ever since.

If you know anything about Commodore, you know it’s been bought a gazillion times by as many companies, after each in turn went bankrupt for one reason or another. Eventually, the Amiga faded away into oblivion, despite small pockets of devoted users who to this day somehow manage to keep it’s legacy alive.

Now it seems that the Amiga may have found a new name for itself, with a new operating system and a new hardware platform. Is the Amiga back? We’ll have to wait and see.

Saturday was a day of disappointment and excitement, all wrapped into a mini package (you’ll get the pun in a bit). I got up super-early—well, for a Saturday—stood in line for over an hour before the Apple store opened (an hour earlier than it’s normal 10am time), and was one of the first few into the store.

The line was a couple dozen long or so, but most were there for iWork ‘05, iLife ‘05 and the newly released Mac mini. Me? Since I haven’t quite got my free iPod yet, I was there for the iPod shuffle, two 512mb versions to be exact, one for me and one for the misses.

Unfortunately, despite confirmations to the contrary from an (obviously misinformed) Apple store clerk the night before, there were no shuffles to be had. A couple of the clerks had demo units—those bastards—hanging from lanyards around their necks, but, as the clerk jokingly acknowledged, these were not for sale. I wasn’t really joking, but oh well, life is hard and then you die. I went home.

No more than two hours later, after a desperate call to the store to confirm stock, the whole family was back in the store, this time to pick up a Mac mini for my wife. I stood in line, holding our youngest, while my wife and three-year old played some Nemo game on an old iMac in the kiddie section. I could see three mini’s on the left and about a half-dozen on the right. A couple minutes and $599 later, we left the store with one of those last three minis.

Read the rest of this entry »

No, this isn’t a call for help or a desperate plea for attention. Now that the Mac Mini is out, my life has reason and purpose.

Forty-four years ago, someone wrote an article in some obscure magazine (well, obscure to me, at least) about what life would be like in the year 2000. That was a long time from then, 39 years to be exact, so the “future” seemed a lifetime of technology away.

It is a pretty interesting read, really. A lot of technological forecasts and predictions, some of which may actually exist now in some form or other. But given the relative slow advancement of technology in the last 39 years (I did say relative), some still seem pretty unlikely, even 39 years from the year 2005.

Our children will learn from TV, recorders and teaching machines.

Ha, ha ha, that’s funn–oh wait, they already do. Is that supposed to be a good thing?

This may not be a big deal for the most part, but to some, it just might very well be.

By default, iChat exposes your personal information, which is available to any other Mac user via Rendezvous. At home this probably wouldn’t matter, but at work, a conference, or school — well, you might not like other people snooping your info.

Fortunately, the fix is quite easy: Launch iChat and under “Privacy” in Preferences, check the box labeled “Block Rendezvous users from seeing my email and AIM addresses.”

via O’Reilly

Sometimes in a shopping center or mall, I’ll come across a kiosk that obviously runs some version of Windows, obvious from the fact that it’s crashed and all that’s visible is the BSOD or an error dialog and a familiar cursor. Certainly it’s not everyday, but when I do, I can’t help but chuckle at the statement that makes. Not just about the operating system, but also about the maintenance, or lack thereof, of the system. Maybe it’s only been down for a few minutes when I’ve seen it, but whether it’s been a few minutes or a few days, the end-user has seen something they shouldn’t.

Here’s an interesting image of what appears to be a crash in the display system for the video billboard at the Paris casino in Las Vegas. You can just make out some sort of dialog, but what really tickled me was the Windows cursor, larger than life, for all the world to see.

Except they shouldn’t.

Via MacMerc.